The Actor

Cut ...

Hang on a minute, you must be thinking, how can I know about a conversation like this? One that has deliberately been conducted away from eavesdropping ears?

The answer, dear audience, is that these people are amateurs, whereas I am a professional.

After what Jenny told me, what did you expect I would do? Just sit back and wait for her to do my job for me? No, I traced her. Discovered where she was going and who she was meeting. It wasn't hard. Jenny works for us, but in practical terms, she's a civilian. Then I set up surveillance on Chris Trenton. All of this is standard practice, no more: a background check, a monitor in his hotel room. Those monitors in particular are very clever devices. When he turned on his new phone the monitor detected it; when the phone did a software update my monitor co-opted it with routine spyware. I didn't need to do a thing.

And then the duffer went and left the phone out in the open all through their conversation. Recovering audio recorded through a trouser pocket can still be a bit iffy. What I got when I checked for updates that afternoon was the full transcript in pristine clarity.

Of course I did these things. You wouldn't expect me to let Jenny go out there on her own would you? Not when I realized the sort of people she might possibly encounter. And she and Coombs were right: this was looking like the department's last best hope. That's not something I could have carelessly left to chance, now is it?